Unstructured Inversion of New Hope

TL;DR

This paper discusses New Hope, a post-quantum cryptography protocol for TLS 1.2, based on lattice structures and modified ring learning with errors, highlighting its potential vulnerabilities to quantum search algorithms.

Contribution

It introduces the structure and implementation details of New Hope, a lattice-based post-quantum cryptography protocol, and analyzes its security against quantum inversion attacks.

Findings

New Hope is implemented in Google Chrome Canary.

The protocol uses a 24-cell Voronoi tessellation for key exchange.

Potential vulnerability to Grover's search algorithm is identified.

Abstract

Introduced as a new protocol first implemented in Google Chrome Canary, New Hope is engineered as post-quantum cryptography for the TLS 1.2 protocol. The structure of the exchange is lattice based, implementing Peikert's key encapsulation mechanism as a modified form of ring learning with errors. The search space used to introduce the closest-vector problem is generated by the intersection of a tesseract and hexadecachoron. This intersection results in a 24-cell Voronoi tessellation. With respect to this tessellation, New Hope may not withstand inversion attempts augmented with Grover's search algorithm.